I PROLOGUE 17 



istic clericalism in Geneva and in Scotland ; the 

 long agony of religious wars, persecutions, and 

 massacres, which devastated France and reduced 

 Germany almost to savagery ; finishing with the 

 spectacle of Lutheranism in its native country 

 sunk into mere dead Erastian formalism, before 

 it was a century old ; while Jesuitry triumphed 

 over Protestantism in three-fourths of Europe, 

 bringing in its train a recrudescence of all the 

 corruptions Erasmus and his friends sought to 

 abolish; might not he have quite honestly 

 thought this a somewhat too heavy price to pay 

 for Protestantism ; more especially, since no one 

 was in a better position than himself to know 

 how little the dogmatic foundation of the new 

 confessions was able to bear the light which the 

 inevitable progress of humanistic criticism would 

 throw upon them ? As the wiser of his contem- 

 poraries saw, Erasmus was, at heart, neither 

 Protestant nor Papist, but an " Independent 

 Christian " ; and, as the wiser of his modern 

 biographers have discerned, he was the precursor, 

 not of sixteenth century reform, but of eighteenth 

 century " enlightenment " ; a sort of broad -church 

 Voltaire, who held by his "Independent Christian- 

 ity " as stoutly as Voltaire by his Deism. 



In fact, the stream of the Renascence, which 

 bore Erasmus along, left Protestantism stranded 

 amidst the mudbanks of its articles and creeds: 

 while its true course became visible to all men, 



